


wide open road (of my future)

by valmerteuil



Category: Pretty Little Liars
Genre: Allison dies, Closeted Character, F/F, Femslash, Queer Themes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-06
Updated: 2016-09-06
Packaged: 2017-11-27 11:02:23
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,690
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/661238
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/valmerteuil/pseuds/valmerteuil
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A. breaks up two of your relationships, and you let your friends hold you, and you cry because you're relieved, and you cry because you shouldn't.</p>
            </blockquote>





	wide open road (of my future)

**Author's Note:**

> This fic was originally published on Feb. 1, 2013, as part of the "Femslash February" challenge. This is a revised and updated version, different enough from the original that I feel justified in changing the publication date. I hope you like it!

You are a little girl, no older than nine, and already you know you're going to get straight out of Rosewood as soon as you can step a toe outside of the county border.

You begin to plan.

-

At first in your dreams it's a big house with a picket fence, three-point-five kids and a big dog, Mrs. American Dream with tenure, married by thirty, happy ever after. You don't stop to think about how the place looks just like Rosewood: you're eleven, and all that matters is, it isn't Rosewood.

That's when you are eleven, and Melissa's fairy tale love affairs are all you have to look up to, all the romance you could ever imagine and more. From where you stand, all her boys are tall and handsome, and they fit snugly around her like a comfort blanket.

You couldn't imagine needing anything else from a lover. Then again, you're eleven, and all you know of love comes from your older sister's whirlwind soap-opera romances.

As you grow up, you forget all about it.

-

At thirteen you've read all the books in your room, and then some. You know now that you can't believe in a prince charming with a white SUV to come and rescue you, and it's been some time since you learned relying on your good looks will not help.

Well. To be fair, your parents aren't leaving you much choice, either.

So you get smart. Clever, you learn, isn't going to cut it. You read books like others flip through magazines, and you learn the life lessons your parents never taught you.

At thirteen your only friends are the teachers and your favorite characters, their advice overriding your own storylines.

That's better parenting than you've ever gotten.

-

You start dreaming of a different fairy tale ending, living in a small flat with books and coffee and sunshine streaming through the windows, a car and a job you love. Sometimes it's teaching, sometimes you dream yourself a writer, a journalist. Sometimes you wish you could become a ballerina, and you think you will be a million different things in your handwriting, a million different stories of Spencer Hastings, but you only get to live one of them.

Making this choice is the scariest thing that you can imagine.

-

That's the year the dating drama begins, the girls pining after the boys, the boys lusting after the girls, one asking the other on a date, blushing, the chaste kissing against the lockers, the not-so-chaste kissing under the bleachers. You and your friends are never distracted from one another, except Allison, and she slips away.

That's the year you start keeping secrets.

That's the year you start lying, responding to every boy you're introduced with a smug, "not my type," over and over, until at one point you finally crumble and Allison learns your secret.

She laughs through your confession, and she kisses you.

-

And then she dies.

She goes out with a bang, candles out, from sweet sixteen to the darkness of a coffin, no light and no air and never again any spark in her smiles.

Her secrets follow her in her grave and yours does too.

You forget it yourself, for some time.

-

Aria leaves for Iceland and she isn't heard from for a whole year, and day after day you persuade himself that it doesn't hurt.

You are mourning the loss of your innocence, and you grieve your best friend, and you strain yourself studying like it's the sole way out.

In the end, that's how you'll make it out of Rosewood, your single goal in life since Melissa got home from a school trip and told about the busy streets and the buildings, a whole life to live that you had never even heard of.

You study and you study and you pretend like you don't miss Aria Montgomery, the pink hair and the pink lips and the smiles against your skin.

You try your best to be the perfect daughter: future Mrs. American Dream and her future American Dream husband, a handsome clean-cut man with a cushy job and a cushier safety net. His face is blurry in your mind, replaceable, forgettable. You will live with him in a big house with a white picket fence, a swinging tire on a rope in the backyard, three-point-five children and an elegant dog. You will be the daughter your parents have dreamed of, the daughter they have worked hard to make you become.

You don't dream.

-

You don't dream until she comes back, no more pink streaks and no more silence, and if it goes downhill from there it's also the moment you start living again.

You tell yourself you'd stopped keeping secrets, you tell yourself it's her coming back that is bringing you all apart even as it seems to bring you together once more.

You don't pause to consider you had no secrets to keep while she was gone, while you had no life and no dreams to call your own.

In your dreams she is yours, and you lose sleep.

-

You never really forget the truth you buried with Allison, you never really forget the lie you've surrounded yourself with like a second skin. They've become the same thing, and if you see it sometimes in Emily's newfound laugh lines, in the way that she pulls Maya close, you avert your eyes.

You date, because that's what the others do, that's what normal girls do. You laugh with your friends, and you cry with them whenever A. strikes hard enough.

A. breaks up two of your relationships and you let your friends hold you, and you cry because you're relieved, and you cry because you shouldn't.

-

You dreamed of that first kiss for so long, night after night of bashing your head against the pillows and trying to forget the breath on your face that felt like more than a dream, the fingers on your skin, and _down_ , and _inside_ , and you, moaning like the first sinner, like Eve being taken by Eve, lying under the tree of knowledge and writhing, her tongue on your hot cunt and her fingers bringing you to forbidden ecstasy. The first time you get yourself off it's with her name on your tongue, a sinful whisper and a cry, and you are just fourteen, do you know what it means to be a lover?

You get drunk together, her head resting heavy on your lap, and she talks and talks and it's the night after Ezra leaves Rosewood, and your smile is strained like a snapping rope because you know intimately how that feels like.

She kisses you first, sloppy and demanding. It coils inside of you like white heat, a throbbing between your legs and you've only just began.

-

You take her to your room like a bride on her wedding day, up over the threshold, and her feet don't touch the ground she’s so tiny. You throw her on the bed and throw yourself after, and you know that all of humanity has done that before you and still you feel like the first.

You pin her thighs open with your hands, drawing her closer to your face and you get her off with your tongue, hot breath over her hot cunt and you kiss her like true love, and you slip your fingers, your tongue inside of her, work out a rhythm, faster and faster and she pulls you closer by the hair, a dull ache in your scalp and she is throbbing against your mouth.

You lose your breath and you tip her over the edge and she giggles through her release, an ecstatic, joyful sound ringing in your ears.

She doesn't leave in the morning.

-

That's the first time.

Before the second time, all of you have left Rosewood. Even Hanna, who never dreamed of anything else than living peacefully where she was born, who maybe never dared to.

The second time, you meet Aria for dinner; you haven't seen her in three years, and you haven't seen the others in that long.

You take her to dinner and you kiss her over dessert, and then you take her to bed and you take her.

She still sighs and laughs and pushes up against you like you learned, and afterwards she fucks you sore with her hands, one covering your mouth and pressing like a vice and the other working furiously inside you, thumb rough on your clit, pushing so, and it hurts, it hurts, like white-hot fireworks clouding your vision, and her hair brushes on your chest as she leans down and whispers: _I'll take you so high, you're never coming down._

She bites you hard, first the shoulder then the edge of your breasts, and on the inside of your thigh she almost draws blood. She kisses you, on the lips and then lower, and she caresses your slit with her mouth until you go mad, until you beg, until you fuck her face with your hips rolling like the tide up against her, and she licks at you like a kitten until you mewl, through your orgasm and then until she gets you off again, patient like you’ve never seen, and gets off on it.

-

You settle down with her in your apartment at first, in a brand new house later on. She makes you go out, makes you make new friends, makes you keep in touch with your oldest ones, and you learn that you don't mind.

She invites Hanna and Emily over at first three weeks after the move, and then your friendship restarts like it was never forgotten. Soon enough they don't need to be asked and you're signing up for Hanna's favorite magazine, and you keep Emily's milkshake recipe on your fridge, and if some days it's almost like they're living here as well, you learn that you don't mind.

You learn that you built yourself a family, a good luck charm to ward off evil as potent as the three-point-five children you once envisioned.

-

You never talk to your parents again. 


End file.
